Santé launched on Y Combinator's "Launch YC" recently!
"Santé gives liquor store owners superpowers."
Santé is making it easy for store owners to run every aspect of their business in one powerful application.
Founded by Darren Fike & Antoine Balaresque. Darren, Santé’s CEO, was the top sales rep at his last two startups, and he has a passion for wine. Last year, he realized that his favorite local liquor stores in NYC still heavily rely on pen and paper. To learn more about the problem, he spent the next four months working at Frankly Wines on nights and weekends and interviewed over a hundred liquor store owners.
Antoine, Santé’s CTO, is a UC Berkeley alum and has founded multiple startups in the past in robotics, e-commerce, and SaaS. He is originally from France.
The duo's mission is to empower tens of thousands of liquor store owners to run their businesses more efficiently using modern software.
HOW IT WORKS
Santé is the all-in-one POS for liquor stores. The goal is to enable tens of thousands of liquor store owners to operate their businesses more efficiently through the use of state-of-the-art software.
❌ The Problem
91% of liquor stores are independently owned and operated. Stores are often understaffed and rely on antiquated systems to manage day-to-day operations. A few examples of common problems for liquor stores:
🔴 Spending hours per week on manual data entry for inventory receiving and creating purchase orders.
🔴 Dealing with complex interstate regulations to sell liquor online (a growing trend).
🔴 Working with poor integrations for local delivery (Drizly, DoorDash, Instacart, etc).
🔴 Mishandling products at checkout because many beers/wines do not have barcodes.
🔴 Losing sales due to poor integration between their POS and marketing tools.
🔴 Losing a meaningful portion of their inventory to theft ($5B+ lost across the industry annually).
In fact, one of Santé's early customers called this industry a “dinosaur industry” after sending them this picture:
✅ Solution
Santé is helping independent liquor stores run thriving businesses with a POS built from the ground up to serve their specific needs:
🟢 Simple Receiving: Saving hours per week with automated inventory receiving and purchase order management
🟢 Theft Monitoring: Using RFID tags on every bottle to track when stolen bottles are leaving the store
🟢 Compliance Management: Source of truth on state-by-state shipping so that stores can open a new revenue stream and ship to all available states across the country
🟢 Robust integrations: Cutting costs by giving store owners all the tools they need to run their business with one subscription to Santé
"Switching to Santé has been a real breakthrough for my business".
-David Calkins, Owner of Wine Gems in Bronxville, NY
